Cath lab’s launch started with Roberta Veloz’s $3M donation
If you’re having a heart attack, you can’t be too picky about where to go to get care. Due to the urgency of such a matter, you must go to the nearest hospital.
According to James Lee, the medical director of the cardiology program and cardiac cath lab at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, a good cardiology program at a community hospital is something residents should demand.
“If your closest hospital isn’t good, your chances of surviving aren’t good,” he said during a recent telephone interview. “You’d literally not want to live in that community. Why would you want to raise your kids in an area where you might lower the chances of surviving something as scary as a heart attack or a stroke?”
Lee said that Santa Clarita Valley residents can rest assured. They don’t have to go over the hill for medical attention should they find themselves in an emergency like a heart attack. Henry Mayo in Valencia has been offering state-of-the-art care since 2012 when it added the Roberta G. Veloz Cardiovascular Center.
According to the city’s website, Santa Clarita, with 218,103 residents as of the count in 2019, is the third largest city in Los Angeles County behind the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The growing population made it necessary for Henry Mayo to offer more services, particularly a cardiology program.
“You have one hospital for this entire expanding population,” Lee said. “When it comes to cardiac medical problems, timeliness of treatment is critical, especially with conditions like a heart attack or strokes. Many people in the community were aware of that need, and it took someone in the community to help donate and fund that program to really push the hospital to take on that project.”
The late Roberta Veloz stepped up. According to her son, Peter Veloz, she gave $3 million in December 2005 for such a program.
Peter Veloz, who’s also a member of the Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital board of directors, said his mom’s donation for a cath lab was something she was personally passionate about.
“My mom had a dear friend whose son-in-law had to be rushed to a hospital in the San Fernando Valley for cardiac cath services, and he suffered a heart attack in transit,” Veloz said during a recent telephone interview. “Fortunately, he survived. But when my mom got the call about this from her friend, she decided that day that she was going to take a substantial portion of the proceeds from the selling of her company (Aquafine Corp.), which was happening at the same time, and donate it to Henry Mayo with the condition that it be used to open a cardiac cath lab in the Santa Clarita Valley, because previously we didn’t have one.”
Veloz said that, in December 2005, his mom walked into the office of former Henry Mayo CEO Roger Seaver and gave him a check right then and there for $3 million.
He added that his mom continued to give monies to what, in June 2012, became the Roberta G. Veloz Cardiovascular Center over the years to make sure it could continue to offer important cardiac services and the most modern technology in the SCV.
“My mom passed in August of 2020,” Veloz said, “so, she got to see the cath lab open. She got to attend the opening. She got to then hear all the subsequent stories of success, the number of people who received these services — those who were having a heart attack in our valley and surviving, who didn’t have to be transported. She was able to get updates on all of this from the hospital. It was really satisfying for her to hear the results and see the results.”
Veloz added that there was a bit of a joke about how, over the seven years of construction, his mom never let off the pressure of wanting the center to be opened as soon as possible. Veloz said she made it her mission to see it completed.
According to Lee, Roberta Veloz’s generosity and passion for a cardiovascular center at Henry Mayo was a big deal, made even more vital with the growing SCV population.
“If you think about what her donation did,” Lee said, “it’s not just helping develop that for the hospital, but it’s really saving lives within the community.”
The need is so clear, he added, that Henry Mayo is currently expanding the center to include an additional cath lab.
According to Patrick Moody, Henry Mayo’s director of marketing and public relations, the hospital expects to start construction this year on that project.
Dale Donohoe, chair of the Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital board of directors, said he’s happy to see how far the cardiovascular center at Henry Mayo has come, and to see it continue to grow. As chief executive officer of Intertex general contractors, he recalled when Intertex built the Roberta G. Veloz Cardiovascular Center. But that wasn’t the first time they’d worked with Roberta Veloz.
“Our first job in 1985 was for Roberta,” Donohoe said. “It’s funny how things come around. We built something for them — for Roberta and her husband, Tom, for Aquafine. Then she donates a large amount of money to the hospital to build it (the cardiovascular center), and then some years later, one of our employees has a heart attack at work and ends up in the cath lab and has a successful outcome.”
Donohoe added that without the cardiovascular center at Henry Mayo, the employee would’ve had to go over the hill and might not have made it.
However, there was a time many years ago, he said, when Santa Claritans in a medical emergency would’ve preferred to drive to the San Fernando Valley for a hospital there. He doesn’t feel that’s the case any longer.
“We’ve just come so far,” he said, “over the last 10 or 15 years with the cath lab, with neonatal, with the hospital tower, with the number of beds, the number of services, with USC Tech. It’s amazing how far the hospital has come, and it starts with all the community leaders and benefactors who are willing to contribute to the hospital to make it the place it is.”
According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease in the U.S. is the leading cause of death for men, women and people of most racial and ethnic groups. Data from a 2022 study indicated that one person dies every 33 seconds from cardiovascular disease.
Data from the CDC that was collected in 2023 showed that more than 356,000 people have out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the country every year, and about 60% to 80% of them die before reaching the hospital.
In addition to having the ability to treat SCV residents in emergencies, Lee said he’s proud to share that since the creation of the Cardiovascular Center at Henry Mayo, the program has gone beyond even the hospital’s expectations.
“Our heart-attack treatment times have sometimes been No. 1 in L.A. County,” he said. “But we usually average in the top five. So, since inception of our program, in terms of our treatment metrics, we benchmark them nationally and within L.A. County.”
He added that, over the years, the hospital has also been doing exponentially more surgeries.
As for what’s next, Lee said that in addition to the expansion project, they’re also working on a new program to address issues caused by heart attacks.
“I’m employed under UCLA, but I’m the medical director of the cardiology program at Henry Mayo,” he said. “One of the benefits of that is that I have insight into one of the best health systems in the nation. I sit as an associate regional director at one of the cardiac programs there (UCLA). What I try to do constantly is bring all that I learned from that health system and try to push the community hospital to reach benchmarks and stay up to date and even at a faster pace than sometimes the hospital may have even thought of pushing themselves.”
An example of Henry Mayo’s mentality is a specialized program they’re launching that, according to Lee, almost no hospital in Southern California is offering. He said it helps further improve outcomes for patients having heart attacks.
He explained a particular procedure in the program that takes place after a certain type of heart attack.
“You take the blood out of the patient, and you super saturate it with oxygen, and you deliver it back in through the artery that they had the heart attack in,” he said. “This is an amazing technology that was FDA-approved in 2019, but it’s not easy to implement. So, UCLA was involved in a clinical trial to try to implement this technology, and they had trouble.”
Yet, Henry Mayo is doing it, Lee said. The hospital is pushing the boundaries, which, he added, kind of goes against the typical reputation of a community hospital.
“When people think of a community hospital, they think it’s always going to be of a lower quality than, say, an academic center like Cedar Sinai or UCLA or USC,” Lee said. “From the cardiovascular-program standpoint, I’ve been really trying to push everyone to not think about it like that. When you think of yourself that way, you almost limit your potential for growth.”
Another new piece of technology that Henry Mayo brought in, according to Lee, is what he called a “pressure wire” that can analyze the entire circulation of the heart in a more detailed manner. This is a procedure, he said, that’s typically only used at academic tertiary medical centers. Again, Lee stressed Henry Mayo’s desire to take the lead on these things.
Lee circled back to the initial goal — a goal that began with Roberta Veloz — which, he said, has since painted Henry Mayo in a new light where many Santa Claritans are no longer saying they want to go over the hill for medical service in the San Fernando Valley.
“Over the last couple decades — at least the last decade, for sure,” he said, “it seems like that’s what they’re now saying on the other side of the hill: ‘Don’t drive me to this hospital, drive me to Henry Mayo.’”
